By Davis Carlton
Tim Keller posted a tweet shortly after Christmas about his experiences with conservatives and liberals and their different understandings of the causes of poverty. In this tweet, Keller said, “I’ve worked w/conservatives and liberals in hands-on efforts to help poor families. The imbalances–conservatives over-stress personal irresponsibility and liberals over-stress structural causes—I’ve seen. These aren’t ‘straw men’. ‘There are more things in heaven and earth…’”
To understand more about what Keller means by the vague reference to “structural causes” we need look no further than what Keller tweeted a little over a year before: “If you’re looking for a basis for talking about racial wealth gaps, see this research. If you are looking for a discussion on what caused those wealth gaps: consider systemic slavery, Jim Crow laws, lynchings, and bank policies between 1865-1965 among others causes…” Keller then posted a graph showing that white men and women are wealthier than their black and Hispanic counterparts:
Keller followed this up with a statement which his more recent tweet parrots, “These are not the only causes. Conservatives see only personal and family causes and the only solutions are civil society solutions. Progressives see only unjust social system causes and the only solutions are social policy solutions.” Keller concluded, “Biblical Justice believes the causes of inequality are always complex. The Right and the Left both see the causes in simplistic terms.”
Here is my response. Keller attempts to disguise his commitments by using meaningless expressions like “civil policy solutions” and “social policy solutions” which are supposedly championed by conservatives and liberals respectively. Keller is attempting to appear “above the fray” by proposing a false, middle-of-the-road intermediate position in between what he considers the conservative and liberal extremes, when in reality Keller is simply parroting mainstream liberal rhetoric on “structural causes” of poverty. Keller asks us to consider “systemic slavery, Jim Crow laws, lynchings, and bank policies between 1865-1965 among others causes” to explain the wealth gap between whites, blacks, and Hispanics.
The first thing to note is Keller’s egalitarian presuppositions. Keller’s graph notes that whites command more wealth than blacks and Hispanics. Okay, so what? Why should we assume, as does Keller, that disparities in wealth must necessarily have arisen because of some injustice? There are multiple reasons that could easily explain these disparities without having to assume injustice on the part of whites. This clues us in that Keller’s understanding of justice is informed not by the Bible, which never presents inequality of material circumstances itself as an injustice. Keller’s sense of justice is formed from the cultural Marxist context in which he has immersed himself since his seminary days.
Keller’s argument also relies upon a duplicitous and ironic kind of race realism. Keller represents the left wing within the false dialectic of modern Christianity on the subject of race. Unlike mainstream “conservative” Christians who reject race as a specious Darwinist construct that has no Biblical basis or support, Keller and those like him (John Piper, David Platt, and Matt Chandler) acknowledge the reality and importance of race. Indeed in some of Keller’s writings he even faintly echoes some Kinist talking points. The difference is that when Keller speaks of race it is for the purpose of trying to help whites understand just how evil and repulsive they are and how they are collectively responsible for all the misery that non-whites have had to endure. Both sides categorically reject any Christian advocacy for white interests as well as any legitimacy for white ethno-states or homelands. Don’t expect Keller to call for blacks to corporately repent of their propensity to violent crime anytime soon.
It’s also worth noting that the graph that Keller presents limits the data set in order to support the liberal narrative. Keller’s graph only presents data on the relative wealth of whites, blacks, and Hispanics. Keller infers that whites enjoy unearned (and therefore unjust) privilege, but what if we include other racial and ethnic groups in our considerations? It’s a well-established fact that Asians make more money than whites, and this is also consistent with breaking down Asians into their different ethnic and racial components. When wealth differences are presented by “religious affiliation” we find that Jews far outpace everyone by a mile. You can bet all your shekels that Keller isn’t going to engage the question of “Jewish privilege.”
It’s likely that if Keller were ever pressed on the disparities favoring Jews and Asians that he would attempt to explain these in terms of the relative merits of these groups and possibly God’s favorable disposition towards the Jews. But this raises the question of why these same reasons can’t be used to explain disparities favoring whites over blacks and Hispanics. This demonstrates an internal inconsistency with Keller’s critique, and provides strong evidence of Keller’s own bias against white people.
But what of the factors proposed by Keller as the cause of this disparity of wealth. Keller lists “systemic slavery, Jim Crow laws, lynchings, and bank policies between 1865-1965 among others causes…” Haven’t these hindered blacks and Hispanics from achieving greater economic and social success? Keller’s statement that “systemic slavery” has hindered blacks is low hanging fruit, because most everyone, including purportedly conservative Christians uncritically accepts the argument that slavery as practiced in America and the West in general from the 17th through 19th centuries was unjust. But was it?
I’ve already addressed slavery years ago on Faith & Heritage, and I doubt that Keller has any interest in seriously engaging arguments that were used by men like Dabney to defend the institution of slavery as it was practiced in the antebellum South. The kind of “systemic slavery” that Keller objects to is described and sanctioned in Lev. 25:44-46, and the founders of America were aware of this passage and used it (as well as others) as justification for their actions. If their interpretation of these texts was wrong then it is incumbent upon Keller and those of his ilk to demonstrate where they erred. Has the slavery practiced in America resulted in the wealth disparity between whites and blacks?
This is extremely doubtful for several reasons. I believe that one major reason for the provision for the permanent enslavement of non-Hebrews by the Israelites was that these non-Hebrews would have the opportunity to benefit from the influences of the Israelite covenant community, even lacking the privileged position of the native born. The same can be observed for the descendants of black African slaves in the West. Blacks in America and throughout the West enjoy a much higher standard of living than blacks living in Africa, which is the poorest region in the world.
If “systemic slavery” was responsible for the disparity of wealth between whites and blacks, then we would expect the descendants of slaves to lag far behind their African counterparts who were not enslaved. Instead we see the opposite, and appealing to colonialism simply won’t help because European colonization always managed to improve economic circumstances in the African countries that were colonized. One only has to look at post-colonial realities in Zimbabwe (formerly Rhodesia) and South Africa to see the devastating effects of a single generation of post-colonial rule.
The same could be said of Jim Crow laws, lynchings, and banking policies prior to the 1960s. Keller doesn’t provide any evidence in support of his contentions because the evidence isn’t on his side. These are examples of how Keller and other pastors strain at gnats while swallowing camels. Less than 3,500 blacks were lynched during the entire period of segregation in America according to the Tuskegee Institute, and black on black deaths greatly exceed this number every year. Even if we assume that every black who was lynched was an innocent victim it should be obvious that lynching simply cannot be the cause of the black/white disparity in wealth. Keller and his fellow race hustlers never discuss black criminality as a possible reason for the wealth disparity because this can’t be blamed on white people.
Voddie Baucham addresses many of the spurious claims made by Keller in his new book Fault Lines and concludes, “Those attempting to blame fatherlessness, crime, and a lack of black achievement today on the legacy of slavery must account for the fact that one hundred years after slavery ended, blacks, according to many measures, were actually doing better than they have in the sixty years since the Civil Rights Act. Sowell notes, ‘As of 1960, two-thirds of all black American children were living with both parents. That declined over the years, until only one-third were living with both parents in 1995.’ This was more pronounced among families in poverty, where ‘85 percent of the children had no father present.’ How then, given the fact that the trajectory worsened after 1960, can slavery and Jim Crow be the cause?”
My hope is that the efforts of Keller and company backfire. Keller endorses race realism in the hopes that white people will finally be able to understand just how evil their ancestors were and how we all bear their guilt until the few remaining white people are left to scavenge for food. Perhaps white people can accept Keller’s race realism without swallowing his lies about the past and how it brought about present inequality. Perhaps white people can understand their collective identity as a positive good worth preserving for future generations, but this can only happen if Keller’s dishonesty and the Hollywood narrative of American history is called out, exposed, and rejected.